He-Man and the Power Sword is the single most important mini-comic in the franchise: it is the first comic Mattel ever produced for the line, it was packed in with the original He-Man action figure in 1982, and it presents the first version of the He-Man and Skeletor origin story before the Filmation cartoon redefined nearly every character. Donald F. Glut wrote the prose, Alfredo Alcala painted the cover and every interior illustration, and the resulting 24-page booklet is the foundation document for everything that followed.
Alcala worked with reference that would have made any other illustrator quit. According to Glut’s later interviews, he had access only to Polaroid snapshots of prototype tooling and the Mark Taylor concept B-sheets. Castle Grayskull on the cover has a more protruding jawline than the eventual toy because Alcala painted from the early concept, not the finished mold. The Sorceress is green-skinned because the early design called her a ‘jungle goddess’, not the Teela-Na figure who would appear in the cartoon. He-Man wears a knife in his boot for the same reason. Skeletor carries an ‘energy blade’ on some pages and the Power Sword on others because nobody had yet locked down which weapon the character used.
The painted cover itself is iconic. He-Man stands square in the foreground, sword raised, the planet Eternia behind him as a hostile red sky. Skeletor lurks at right with the matching half of the sword. Alcala’s hand is unmistakable: dense crosshatch shadows under the armor, painted highlights on the steel, a feathered atmospheric haze that nothing else in the children’s toy market of 1982 was attempting.
For collectors, the original printing in card-stock binding is the target. Reprint variants exist with a different MOTU logo and eight pages cut for the promotional edition, and the 2014 Dark Horse hardcover reprinted the full original at a respectable scale. Original cover art has surfaced once at auction, in 2014, hammered well into five figures. Loose copies in NM grade move in the $30 to $60 range; cardback-attached copies still in cellophane move considerably higher.
Catalogue source: heman.fandom.com and wikigrayskull.com (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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